I listened in the same day the post went up. But as you know I am not so well versed on the subject.Celtic adu idu ellam enakku theriyadu:-)

Onga piece konjam Raja maadiri ennaku thonithu- soothing.

Arun: 🙂 ! Raja? That is too kind a compliment! Btw, Celtic – you got misdirected by the word Highlands – albeit it was a cryptic reference. There is nothing celtic about it. Think “Highlands” in tamizh as in sangam days – that is a reference to [u]a part[/u] of the raga name. I have blogged about this raga itself earlier.

Arun, perhaps you can use the ‘invisible text’ feature you use for the ragas quiz when you post answers here also? That way people won’t look at the answers accidentally.

Thanks for the puzzle. Enjoyed solving it.
As I mentioned to you, it would help to have more overlap between Across & Down words.

Arun: You mean for people who run into the solution post when they didn’t mean to? I dont know how that would work here for the image itself – although I could do it for the text/explanation part. I guess I could post a link to the image rather than the image + hidden text (i could do the whole thing as a page, but my wordpress theme adds additional interpretation to these standalone pages which I do not like)

I take back my last comment above…
the puzzle did have a fair amount of A-D overlap!

Arun: Usually I construct puzzles so that the # of Across and # of Down Clues are close to each other (i.e. 7 and 8 for 15 clues) and thus this guarantees overlap. But because of the nature of the answers (lots of vowels, length etc.) – the overlap can be mainly in vowels and thus may not be off as much help as in regular crosswords. But I can also put more effort in selecting clues from my bucket to allow for more meaningful overlap – i am too lazy to do that 🙂

I am quite fascinated to learn about the process of setting up a crossword puzzle.
When you have a moment, do provide us a Puzzle-101 lesson. Thanks.

Arun: Actually to be honest, I cheat by simply relying on the software (Crossword Forge). I come up with clues and answers, and ask it to create the puzzle – depending on the answers, it does some magic and it can create a decently balanced one or not. I can ask it to try again. If it really has trouble fitting all the answers, I try to drop one or two clues and pick another one. Like I hinted earlier, I haven’t spent much effort on how to make the grid well balanced – my effort is all spent on coming up with the clues themselves.